EVENTS

If you close your eyes, you will disappear

One quick bit of stupid to smack because I just saw it so it’s fresh in my mind – Dan Fincke has a (public) mini-essay on Facebook making the point that it’s not very humanist or reasonable or compassionate to respond to a woman who says she has PTSD from verbal abuse by assailing her with more verbal abuse. Predictably but annoyingly there’s a guy who keeps saying all she has to do is stay off social media, and problem solved.

It’s not victim blaming if there is a 100% effective way to avoid being a victim. Even doing nothing would prevent becoming a victim in this context. A victim in this instance would have to willfully participate in their victimhood.

Someone responded with “like going to parties or bars.”

No, like not reading what people are saying to you on social media.

Ok stop right there. 100% effective way to avoid being a victim? Just not reading what people are saying to you on social media?

You have got to be kidding.

It’s on social media. What does that mean? That it’s public. Other people can see it. What does that mean? It’s trashing your reputation. Can you 100% solve that problem by not reading it?

Most of those people are also the people who do tell us that if we go to a con or a bar or drink or work outside the home or wear the wrong thing, that we should expect to be harassed / raped. I don’t think they’re missing the connection at all. I think they just want us to either shut up and take it or stay home. Preferably, both.

The message is, “That’s what you get for existing while female”. There is no concern for Melody’s actual safety or quality of life. If she doesn’t want to be punished she needs to stay out of sight and out of mind. Her visibility and her ability to influence the world around her is threatening to the culture that coddles these shitlords. So, they’re trying to shut her up and make her go away. Of course, these same people will then claim that Schrodinger’s rapist and the very idea of rape culture or patriarchy are the real sexism and that women don’t do public speaking because it’s “more of a guy thing”. What else are they going to say, the truth? That it is clear that misogyny is a real problem that harms actual people and that they actively participate in and encourage others to perpetrate that problem?
Nah.
They’ll keep denying and gaslighting as they continue the barrage of harassment and threats.

That guy is long-winded, isn’t he? Seems fitting for Fincke. But he’s also obtuse.

Internet trolls aren’t nice people. They look to provoke flame wars, and get under people’s skin. It is entirely possible for a person to call someone the n-word without being a racist, because they know it will get the person they are trolling into a frenzy(understandably so).

Really? You’re going to give racists a pass if they say they are merely ‘trolling’? It’s good to see Fincke smacking him down.

By the way, on Mr Halpin’s own timeline, he now says this:

You know what. Anyone who doesn’t like my criticisms of extreme feminism, my apparent fetish for playing devil’s advocate/being a contrarian on sensitive issues, or is likely to get their panties in a wad and get offended by the well-intentioned, and honest things I say, should just go ahead and unfriend me now. It’ll save me the trouble of discovering how much of a douchebag or cuntbucket you are. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

I got bingo on my playing card for just that one paragraph. Impressive.

If he is roughed-up by his peers, rejoice; he is learning early about the real world. Don’t make a sissy out of him. If you jump to his defense every time another child takes away a toy, pushes your child down, or even pops him in the nose, you will rear a social crybaby. When you demand that your child be treated fairly, you are protecting him from reality. The younger they are, the better to learn that they deserve no equality. Your reactions are not going to make life any less unfair for your child; but you can mold a feel-sorry-for-myself attitude. If you are tough they will be tough.

If you are on the wrong end of an online storm, like the one directed at Melody at the moment ,your only way to avoid it is to be off the internet, away from the phone, possibly even not be at home. But unless all women pre-emptively never go on the internet, or interact with society at all, how are they not at risk from being exposed to it at any moment? I mean it’s not like the instant she, or anyone else targeted with harassment, popped onto the internet they were bombarded with hate. It was probably fun at first, still probably is most of the time, keeping in contact with IRL and online friends is fun. Then along comes a misogynistic dog pile, how is she or anyone else supposed to know they are required to immediately vacate their online life when this happens?

Not to mention what a tool it gives trolls, don’t like what someone has to say? You can easily harass them into silence. What they are actually trying to do, but this guy would make it even easier.

” It is entirely possible for a person to call someone the n-word without being a racist,
because they know it will get the person they are trolling into a frenzy(understandably so).”

Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night explores the idea that one can pretend to be a racist without being one in order to produce a greater good. At least Vonnegut’s character was trying to do good. Trolls are not motivated by good. Vonnegut’s novel discredits the idea that evil can produce good; evil, in this case using racist invective for evil, can only be evil.

So no, you can’t pretend to be a racist and not be one, and the only person you’re fooling is yourself.

Or something like that .

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